Yoko Ono is present in this art scene, who’da thought she had a life prior to you know who? She was at DIAS, that is the Destruction In Art Symposium of September ’66 held in London, of which 'The main objective … was to focus attention on the element of destruction in Happenings and other art forms, and to relate this destruction in society.' This is her performance ‘Cut’, shot by the Maysles Brothers who cut all of her clothes off in this particular sitting whilst she remains expressionless and cross legged. Another performance she did:

"…took the form of a recitation delivered by the author with her back to the audience. On the left of the dimly lit stage there was what appeared to be a canebrake and the only other decorative item was a large garden hat, sprinkled with flowers and suspended about twenty feet above the stage. As miss Ono read her lines (picked at random from the script), she was accompanied by a large number of loudspeakers through which was played a tape recording of what might have been the cries of some creature in the terminal stage of idiocy. Sample lines from Miss Ono`s script :
Lets count the hair of the dead child .
Drink Pepsi Cola"

She was doing weird performance art way before it was popular… hang on, has it ever been popular? Among a few, yes. For most, no. I happen to enjoy watching it myself, though I was sacrificed to fits of debilitating laughter at one earnest performance, to the point where stern looks forced me to leave the hall.

Check this out:
http://www.artnotart.com/fluxus/index.html

It’s the auto-destructive work of Gustav Metzger that mesmerises me first, perhaps because it’s in the first room of the exhibition. There is an installation of what an auto-destructed work looks like: as if a toddler attacked a canvas with a saw. But the black and white projection of Gustav in a gas mask and goggles applying acid to a canvas stretched across a backdrop of Buckingham, watching the canvas disintegrate, revealing the palace… intercut with close-ups of acid disintegrating materials; It is fascinating viewing.

I am supported in this claim by two children whose father can’t drag them away because they want to see the whole canvas burned right out by the acid. All kinds of thoughts flow, of veils being lifted to reveal the truth about British society, of the slow and vaporous warping of ideas and perceptions. I mean, Gustav was probably on acid at the time. Nonetheless, the clichés about the swinging sixties are stripped from me as I walk through the door, replaced with a clear presentation of the political statements artists made, the conceptual breakthrough and unity of these Happenings and Symposiums which seem so tangible, so close to my understanding of the present.

And this brings me to John Latham. He burnt piles of books called Skoob towers, which represented the laws of England, and set them on fire outside the British Museum in his contribution to DIAS. He offers physics theory and thought to visual and conceptual art, giving words and shape to what Gustav was doing with acid on nylon. He asked artists to remember that we are made up of atoms; audiences to consider the perspectives of science, art and sociology as connected and parallel; and scientists to acknowledge artists as representatives of the forces of science and nature. Or something like that.

His theory of flat time makes me wish I had paid more attention to my year 10 lab teacher with the tight jeans and the B.O. It is one explanation as to what was happening in art in the 60s , which I can attempt to boil down some of in an extremely simplistic manner: that art is the non-linguistic embodiment of philosophy- philosophy comes from somewhere, from books but also environment, events, atomic mutations, land reformation etc. Around the 50s and 60s, long traditions of widely understood representations of ideas in art from realism to abstraction, graduated into blank canvas, the "exhibition of minimalism, where the last minimalist statement where a zero-action canvas presented as a work."

This too was philosophy, but Latham sees it as indicative of more than art and fashion, but of fluctuations of time and consciousness that can be further understood with the assistance of physics theory and understandings. The blank canvas, the obliteration of forms- did this mean we'd come back to square one? When he gets in to this speak, I'm lost…

" If we call the universe we’re in U Now, it could be traced back through a U - 1U - 2. And when we get down to a U1, proto-universe of one extended state from a non-extended state. What is of extreme interest is that if one starts from a universe with one extended state, that has to go back instantly to a non-extended state. What you have is what is virtually a co-present, non-extended plus impulse-informed non-extended state and the expression of the extension."

But I'm going to pull out some Idiot's Guide to Physics soon and give it a good hard go.

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I have to start with this one because it's stuck in my mind over the past few days (along with 'On Deadly Ground' starring Steven Seagal- my mind is a mixed up place).

I saw 'The Piano Teacher' early this year and it deeply affected me- a long largely silent treatment of a self-loathing woman, also a gifted pianist, privately disturbed and publicly decent. And her love affair which we are cruelly tricked into thinking might be her salvation.

So I can see where the relentless, unsympathetic cruelty comes from in 'Funny Games'. It's like writer/director Michael Heneke wants us to remember that films and their populations ARE NOT REAL! Yet it's his sense of realism, such as long, quiet scenes where not much happens, that makes the unhappiness of the characters' more tangible and almost void and null. I think he's into Neitzche. Or maybe he's simply Austrian.

Neitzche said this apparently:
"What does not destroy me, makes me strong."
Or,
"What doesn't kill you makes you stronger"

Seems like this could be in Haneke's A-Z of audience manipulation; except he's more like a big eagle flinging a mouse around in his talons than jolly old grandma Neitzche.

In 'Funny Games', two young men dressed in tennis whites wander into a holiday house in the Austrian countryside. Man, wife and son having just arrived for the summer from town. Man and wife like opera, son is learning to like opera, albeit somewhat confused by it and them. Tennis white boys like psychotic punk music and eggs. Broken eggs. And golf clubs. And broken knee caps. The two young men stay on uninvited, chattering in a civil fashion, and torturing the daylights out of the family.

They've already done the same to a few other families in the region and are on their way to do a few more. There's a self-conscious tool in which the main Tennis White talks to the audience and rewinds and replays some of the action. It's a bit much, as I thought the torturer's philosophic musings were enough to explain that bad childhood's or psychosis are NOT the reasons for such activities. These killers are obviously into power and manipulation of emotions; like our grinning eagle, Haneke. And all three of them probably hate rich people too, by the way. Having said that, I admit I fast forwarded through a lot of the action myself. Couldn't bear it.

I seem to be delving into thriller territory lately, a road yet untaken by me. Why is there a market for watching naive helpless, somewhat stupid characters being put through relentless violent torture by powerful and unpredictable manipulators? Is it a reaction against insipid and idealistic portrayals of the 'humanity of humans' ? Or a realistic statement on the possibility that we are all torturous little fuckers in our own small ways? Or something else? I don't have the answers, let me know if you do.

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